Groups as political persons
In my work on political liberalism, I identify a problem of making certain groups function as corporate political persons. Groups such as legislatures, courts, and political parties make judgments of fundamental political issues. For these groups to function as persons offering public reasons for their views, they need a solution to the discursive dilemma. I engage with challenge and how groups should respond to it in a paper published in Social Theory and Practice.
The discursive dilemma is a social choice paradox developed primarily by Christian List and Philip Pettit. It shows how a group of three or more members governed by a majority voting rule cannot reliably make consistent judgments of a set of logically interconnected proposition.
But this is exactly what we require from political persons. They must give reasons for their political decisions, and that involves judging interconnected propositions. Making groups function as political persons may therefore require individual group members to deliberate and make judgments they would not have outside of the group.
Freedom as political autonomy
In another part of this project, I compare Rawls’s political liberalism and Pettit’s republicanism. One paper exploring this comparison is published in The Journal of Ethics, while another is forthcoming in The Southern Journal of Philosophy.
I argue that their differences are terminological rather than substantive. By stripping away key terms in both theories, I show that they prescribe the same political institutions. Pettit’s ideal of republican freedom is Rawls’s ideal of political autonomy.
For Rawls, citizens enjoy political autonomy when they hold equal shares in the exercise of political power. And they do so when the fundamental principles governing their society constitute a freestanding political conception of justice based on an overlapping consensus of the citizens’ comprehensive doctrines. The political conception is thus autonomous of any particular comprehensive doctrine.
For Pettit, citizens enjoy freedom from domination when their government is under popular control, which requires that they have equal opportunities for influencing political decision-making. Popular control is only compatible with a government forced to track the interests of the people, Pettit explains. These interests are shared by the members of a modern pluralistic society, as decision-making tracking interests held exclusively by a certain group and conflict with other people’s interests would amount to domination.
To identify the shared popular interests, Pettit must apply the procedure of Rawls’s political constructivism and require that political decision-making be based on principles that every reasonable person can be reasonably expected to accept. In other words, these principles must be based on an overlapping consensus and form a political conception that guarantees citizens’ political autonomy.
These are my published papers on political liberalism so far:
2024. Collectivizing Public Reason. Social Theory and Practice 50(2): 285–306.
2023. Republican Freedom and Liberal Neutrality. Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 26(2): 325–348.
2023. Republicanism as Critique of Liberalism. Southern Journal of Philosophy 61(2): 308–324.
2022. Eliminating Terms of Confusion: Resolving the Liberal–Republican Dispute. Journal of Ethics 26(2): 247–271.